This really is the endgame – and it looks as if George W. Bush will be the nation’s 43rd president.

Someone had to step in to end the election chaos before it escalated out of control, and so the U.S. Supreme Court finally did it – very, very reluctantly and by the narrowest 5-4 vote.

After more than a month of election mess, only the nation’s highest court has the credibility to try to pull some order out of the madness.

Justice Antonin Scalia made it clear that the court’s 5-4 majority took the extraordinary step of issuing an emergency stay because it is inclined to think Bush is right and the hand counts must stop for good.

“The issuance of the stay signals that a majority of the court . . . believe that [Bush] has a substantial probability of success” when it hears the case tomorrow, he wrote in supporting yesterday’s stay.

But in the process, the nation’s highest court revealed that it, too, is split right down the middle on political lines over the election mess – just like everyone else.

“A 5-4 ruling would be the saddest of outcomes because it would make people think the Supreme Court is political, too,” warned Fordham University constitutional law professor Abner Greene last week.

That’s why the U.S. Supreme Court initially tried to punt the case back to the Florida court and urged it to tread carefully – instead, the Florida court said “Bleep you” to the nation’s highest court, as Northwestern University constitutional law professor Stephen Presser put it.

So the U.S. Supreme Court was faced with the fact that either it made the rulings to decide who is president – or it would let the Florida Supreme Court act as if it was the nation’s highest court.

Florida’s Supreme Court voted 4-3 to change the rules for picking the president with new hand-counts that its own chief justice called unconstitutional – would the U.S. Supreme Court stand by and watch?

So the U.S. Supreme Court’s five conservatives (all Republican appointees) bit the bullet and granted Bush his stay while the four liberals (two Republicans, two Clinton appointees) sided with Gore.

The four liberals – including David Souter who was appointed by Bush’s dad – echoed Gore’s claim that the hand-recounts should go on since they’d do no harm and could always be canceled later.

In fact, the counts are far from neutral – Gore’s whole strategy has been to get some kind of hand count that would allow him to claim victory before the clock stops.

Suppose the high court let the count go on and ultimately ruled it was unconstitutional? Team Gore would still claim it was robbed and America’s constitutional crisis would only get worse.

As Scalia noted yesterday, once any new counts became known, they are part of the public consciousness and “once announced, cannot be retracted.”

Scalia thereby signaled he thinks this election is over – without any more hand counts. And showed once again how important it will be who becomes president and gets to pick the next U.S. Supreme Court justices.